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***Apologies for multiple postings of this announcement***

***The deadline for manuscript submission has been extended to 20th, February 2017.***

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IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems (TCDS)

Special Issue on “Symbol Emergence and Developmental Systems: Social Symbol Grounding and Embodied Cognition in Humans and Robots”

I. Aim and Scope

Exploring human cognitive development constitutes a basic step towards endowing robots with high level human-like cognitive functions. Human embodied cognition follows a seamless process of development, which includes the development of sensorimotor skills, understanding concrete ideas and events, using concepts representing physical entities to describe objects, and coordinating multiple abstractions within complex representations. Investigating these aspects that bootstrap human cognitive development through appropriate theoretical and computational cognitive modeling allows for making robots capable of handling objects through the cumulative learning experiences that could develop sensorimotor skills, developing social skills through social learning strategies, grounding abstract concepts in the sensorimotor system, and developing linguistic skills in order to represent situations through language within interaction.

A symbol system combines a group of tokens into structures and manipulates them through explicit rules to produce new expressions. The task of assigning a meaning to each meaningless symbol in a structure defines the “Symbol Grounding” problem, which has static physical and social components. The “Physical Symbol Grounding” allows an agent to form an internal explicit representation of an external-world referent so as to interpret symbols semantically. Whereas, the “Social Symbol Grounding” allows for developing a common lexicon of symbols grounded in perception information within a population of agents, which could lead to a gradual emergence of language through social interaction. A recent approach to semantically interpreting a symbol system is “Symbol Emergence”, which accounts for the dynamic and self-organized nature of symbols that constitute human cognition. These complementary representations of a symbol system are still considered as real challenges in cognitive developmental robotics, and they require more elaborate theoretical and experimental studies in order to better understand the aspects of human behavior development.

II. Themes

This special issue aims to shed light on cutting-edge research lines in cognitive developmental robotics at the intersection of human cognitive science, artificial intelligence, machine learning, language science, and robotics research. Topics relevant to this special issue include, but are not limited to:

Manuscripts should be prepared according to the journal’s “Information for Authors” instructions found at http://cis.ieee.org/publications.html, and submissions should be done through the IEEE TCDS Manuscript center: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/tcds-ieee (please select the category “SI: Symbol Emergence”).

IV. Important Dates

20 February 2017 Deadline for papers submission
20 May 2017 First notification for authors
30 June 2017 Deadline for revised papers submission
15 July 2017 Final notification for authors